Pathway of Wholeness

The lens of wholeness gives us a way of understanding conflict. A problem well articulated is already half solved as they say. So let's understand conflict in the context of wholeness... wholeness is another word for Unity consciousness, we are all of one source and we are all headed for one ultimate destination. We are all made from the same stuff, we are interconnected in myriad ways - seen and unseen, we are related, we are not separate... we are ultimately One.

If you have ever been on the receiving end of spiritual gaslighting where your concerns and difficulties were erased or downplayed as "your process", what is this situation mirroring for you? Then you would quite rightly, perhaps, bristle at the use of wholeness here. Believe me I have been there many times. Particularly new age "love and light" organisations would rather frame conflict as your learning path than actually listen. And that is because "love n light-ers" are firstly terrified of their own suppressed darkness, terrified of conflict and confuse harmony with unity.

Harmony is not Unity, Unity has both harmony and dis-harmony in equal measure. Life, the process of life itself, is the dance between harmony and disharmony... between movement and stillness, between action and rest, between having and not having... where there are opposites only together do they create wholeness.

So, the pathway of Wholeness asks us to make peace with conflict. To understand that it is inevitable and often full of information, the processing and integrating of that information is the pathway back to Peace. Making peace with conflict does NOT mean that we simply accept abuses done by imbalances of power, it does not mean we lie down and allow the oppressors to reign. But it means that we broaden our internal horizons to see the wider, deeper picture that holds all conflict and all peace.

If conflict or discord or dissent is inevitable then it can also be useful. When we welcome its wisdom, intelligence and information in, rather than simply suppressing it in the name of an uneasy false peace. Then that which is conflicting, discordant and dissenting feels safer - it feels heard and empathised with - and thus, hopefully, will bring less violence.

Violence and conflict are not the same thing. Conflict is where there are competing sets of needs that are not being met. Violence is where harm is done in the pursuit of those needs. Folks who are frightened of conflict are actually afraid of violence. Violence can be BiG like all out war... but violence can be localised, small violences like shaming tactics, exclusion, micro-aggressions.

While there are certainly peoples out there who love violence for the sake of violence; I happen to believe that the significant majority of human beings long for peace. If we can understand the longing for needs to be met, the nature of the needs and the art of compromise; then we stand a chance at peace building. For those lost to violence they are running ancestral scripts of trauma and they need to be contained with Love, have their weapons removed from them, all rewards of violence must cease.

Then without their weapons and rewards, with nothing but their screaming void they will collapse and they, as wholeness tells us, are us. We are that. So how do we tend to the most traumatised and haunted amongst us? By grieving together what harmed them so much they turned to harm others. Grief is the medicine.